


The Crush Zone

by metropolisjournal (TKodami)



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Genre: Bruce’s poor boundaries between anger and desire, Frottage, Identity Reveal, M/M, Missing Scene, Mixed Signals, Mostly fits into BvS canon, Open Ending, Porn With Plot, express verbal consent, ignominious use of bat vehicles, no seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-16 19:39:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11259600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/pseuds/metropolisjournal
Summary: (set during Batman v. Superman) After the showdown at the Gotham Port and a hostile confrontation with the Bat vigilante, Clark tries to apologize for wrecking the Batmobile. Bruce is so angry, he can hardly keep his priorities straight. Will Bruce be able to hide what he thinks of the alien, or will everything end badly?Written for the Superbat Big Bang 2017.





	The Crush Zone

**Author's Note:**

> WE DID IT, LIO. Art for this fic was made by the inimitable [steals_thyme](archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain/pseuds/Steals_Thyme). You can check it out [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11264247). [Susiecarter](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11259600) and [architeuthis](http://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis) made sure that all of my particles were in the right place, and nominatives were not absolute. Any remaining mistakes are entirely mine.

* (C) *

As the gate jangled shut behind Clark, he caught the faded Wayne Construction posters that papered the outer wall of the Gotham low-rise, and ringed the neighboring complexes. Pale tri-color prints enthused Mr. Wayne and You, Building the Future—but their once-crisp edges drooped under the weight of Gotham promises. The neighborhood hadn’t seen new construction in thirty years. 

Clark’s interviews had hit a dead end. Everyone that had peered out at him from behind their chain locks had told a different story about the Bat. He was a hero. He was a terrorist. He was the reanimated shade of justice whose thirst could only be slaked by vengeance. (That had been a memorable interview, to say the least.) No one at the GCPD seemed interested in speaking to Clark, not even when he’d intimated that an off-the-record word could help stem the tide of brandings in the city. 

The Bat's operations held no discernable pattern. Clusters of eyewitness reports would roll through the Gotham tabloids for months at a time, then would vanish for an equal amount of time. Then a flurry of tweets and blurry photographs from the Bowery and the Diamond District on the same night—and the GCPD would deny everything. National Guard training maneuvers, they’d claim. Maybe that was the truth. 

Clark hadn’t been there; he couldn’t know for sure. 

In any case: he was back at square one and the sun was hurrying itself out of the glass canyons of the city. 

Clark wound a hand into his tie knot, and yanked it free of his collar. He ducked into an alleyway and felt the lazy roll of time as it flowed around him like the breaking tide. He stuffed his glasses, tie, jacket, shirt, shoes, and pants into his messenger bag as he stripped down to the blue, yellow and red of his family’s legacy. He had taken a risk wearing the suit. The tweed jacket had hidden the bulky flap that held his cape, but all it would have taken was one interested person who wondered about the lump in his jacket to notice the glasses slipping down his nose as he scribbled in his notepad... 

It had been a risk, and he’d made the exception for Gotham. 

He touched where the whorled Kryptonian suit met the clasps for the cape, streaming outward behind him. As he reached the end of the alley, in less time than a dragonfly could beat its wings, he threw the messenger bag high enough for its strap to catch on the snout of one of the city’s Gothic Revival obsessions. He would circle back around for it later, after he spent his night surveilling the ports. 

Chances were good no one would show up, and Clark would be filing a football piece with maximum hostility before tomorrow’s lunch break. 

Fortune, however, favored a slightly different outcome. 

When a squeal of tires and a sharp burst of gunfire echoed through the deserted section of the old Gotham Port, Clark flew to the scene to watch the Bat vigilante’s—tank was the only word he had for it—grapple one of the sedans and drag it behind its armored bulk like a toy. It took all of Clark’s patience (and some that he had to borrow against interest) to restrain himself from snapping the cable with a well-placed en pointe landing. He pulled himself back into the shadow to watch the chase unfold. But when the Bat-tether retracted, to hurl the sedan like a battering ram against another vehicle—Clark sprang into action. He slipped through the twisting wreckage of the cars. Slowed at the moment before impact, the cars hung together like a diorama of a crash rather than the actual thing; one by one, Clark freed the mercenaries from seat-belts, gun-belts, and ammo-cans, and seeded the roofs of the empty warehouses with bewildered, unarmed men. 

When time reasserted itself, the sedan pancaked the parked SUV. The passenger cells had crushed inwards; if anyone had remained inside, they would have died. 

The Bat had no sense of responsibility. He would have let everyone in those cars die, and the GCPD would have swept this underneath the rug as another unfortunate military training accident. 

Clark saw red. He shot into the air and sighted the convoy as it prepared to leave the corridor of abandoned warehouses. The Bat tank seemed nigh-invulnerable. A building, a truck bed, a ship, and an anti-tank missile hadn’t stopped it. If Clark wanted it to stop, he would have to make him stop. 

And Clark would show him what he so clearly lacked. Superman would show the Batman mercy. 

~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~

* (C) *

Clark lay on top of the thin cotton sheets of his bed. A trimly-folded afghan rested next to his legs. It was a single point of warmth against his skin in the drafty studio, but he just bumped up against it with his calf. He hadn’t unfolded it yet. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to. 

It had been hours since the confrontation at the Port. Everything had gone disastrously wrong. The Bat had braked too late to slow the unstoppable force of the Bat tank’s drift, and its side had smashed into the immovable object of Clark and ricocheted into the scaffolding of a gantry crane. He had disabled the Bat’s vehicle, and lost the Bat his quarry. He had expected self-righteous, screaming indignation. 

He hadn’t expected the calm, meticulous rage that stole over the Bat so completely that he couldn’t meet Clark’s gaze. Clark had felt the hot rays of the Bat’s anger lapping against his skin as the vigilante’s pulse spiked. Then the feeling had transmuted—into what, Clark still couldn’t identify. The Bat’s pulse dropped precipitously and evened out in a sluggish pace, as though he was taking a leisurely constitutional. The Bat’s only words had mocked Clark’s mercy; threw Clark’s authority back into his face. No one had authority over the Bat. Certainly not an extraterrestrial threat.

 _Do you bleed?_ The Bat had sneered.

Now that Clark was counting water stains on the ceiling, it was painfully obvious that he’d taken the wrong tack. His mercy had been interpreted as intimidation. He bumped his legs against the afghan and felt sleep slip further away from him.

Clark slid his hands under his pillow, and squeezed his eyes shut in defiance. 

He’d screwed up. He didn’t need the Bat to spend his days thinking of creative ways to penetrate his skin; he’d already amassed a dozen supervillains who had vowed to discover a non-Kryptonian pathway to his demise. He reached for his cellphone, patting across the small nightstand—until he had shifted far enough off the bed for it to poke out from under his thigh. He scrolled down to a number marked HOME. After several long rings, the line picked up. 

“Clark—?”

The customary greeting died in his throat. He sighed instead; he was more tired than he'd thought. 

“Clark, honey, is everything okay?” 

“Yeah, Ma. Look, I know it’s late—” Late was generous; it was pushing 2 am in Metropolis. “—and I must sound terrible.”

“You sound cold.” Martha chuckled. “Do you need me to pack you some of your things from your room?”

“No, no. Leave everything where it is. I can buy blankets if I want them.” Clark pulled the receiver away from his face as he cracked a smile. 

“Well,” Martha said, and he heard her answering smile. It’d been a long time since they’d had that exchange; almost gone two years since his days up North in the unbroken Arctic midnight; when he could only put in calls from the Yellowknife dive he worked, and they'd usually been nothing more than brief exchanges about the farm and about the snow.

“Ma—” His smile faded. “—I was thinking about the farmhouse where the Millers' old truck broke down. Think we could visit when I’m back in town?”

The pause, and she understood what Clark was actually asking. “That would be fine. Look forward to it.”

If he said any more, he would regret the lack of privacy later, so Clark made himself say a quick goodnight and hung up. Five minutes later, he stood in the tall brome about twenty yards from the porch, back in the suit. Martha pushed the screen door on its hinges, a heavy shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and just stood looking him over like he was a sick calf and she was a minute away from fetching out warm milk. She didn’t, of course. Instead, she met him out next to the dirt path where the Millers’ truck—an old plastic toy—stuck a wheel out of the dirt all of these years later.

The Kansas landscape was a flat bowl. There was a kind of open-ended communication with the winds and the earth, such that a man in his own field cursing his tractor could be heard a quarter-mile away, and a neighbor could head over with a fresh set of wrenches and spare parts to ask what the trouble was. The Langs had made a habit of arriving just in time for those awkward encounters that had peppered his childhood: Jonathan explaining the crumpled tractor hood with child-sized handprints while Clark clutched the frayed edge of his red cape.

It was a cold, clear night, but Clark was out-of-sorts enough in the suit that he didn’t want to feed his ma his superhero anxieties over coffee in the kitchen. The farmhouse was crowded with enough memories as it was. 

Clark spoke quickly in the late-night hush. He told her everything that had happened in the apartment, and maybe a little more than that—when he mentioned the afghan on his bed, Martha had murmured, still miss her, don’t you? 

God. Lois. 

The afghan had been an apartment-warming present from Lois, after they had jointly decided to ‘explore other romantic interests’. She had insisted he have something to throw over his shoulders if he ever came down with the Kryptonian flu; Clark thought she just couldn’t stand to leave Clark with his three boxes in a space that resembled a post-industrial prison more than it did a studio walkup. 

Clark didn’t want to lie, but the truth was he missed being touched more than he missed Lois specifically. That was a terrible truth to admit about a person he’d spent a year loving—but their split had been definitive. Clark had set out on his Bat vigilante crusade a week after he’d moved out, and hadn’t spent much energy on what-ifs.

Clark squared his shoulders, and then let the weight of his burden tug him toward the ground into the slump that Clark Kent used to fool the Daily Planet bullpen on a nine-to-five clock.

“I stopped a man who was terrorizing Gotham today, Ma, and now… I don’t know. I’m regretting it,” he said instead. “He bounced his car off of me and ran into a metal pillar.”

Martha’s gaze sharpened. “Is he all right?” 

“We didn’t part on speaking terms. I’m sure he’s fine.” 

She grabbed Clark’s shoulders with both hands. The shawl slipped free of the crooks of her arms, but she barely paid it any mind. “You didn’t check?”

Clark’s jaw clicked as it closed. He hadn’t checked. The mercenaries had been whisked from their cars before impact; but the Bat had hit both him and the gantry crane. Clark knew how fragile a life could be wrapped inside of a crushed safety cell; how quickly a person could bleed out from untreated internal injuries. Was it the Bat’s dig at his Kryptonian heritage that had kept him from checking? Or was it simple anger at the way he had only looked up once Clark hovered overhead, the manifestation of the greater calamity that could befall them both?

The Bat wasn’t an ally, wasn’t an enemy. The only thing between them was the promise of more violence, but Clark knew he was in the wrong.

“I don’t know where to find him,” he admitted. Except that wasn’t true anymore, was it? He had the beginning of an evidence trail: the crash site at the Port. 

Martha fished the shawl out of the short grass and pulled it tight around her, blowing out a breath against the bitter cold. “Find him and be sure.” 

“Any advice for a man who may want to see me dead?” 

Martha sucked on her teeth, the way she did when she was mock-considering her next words. “Bring a present.”

Clark started back, incredulous. “He hates me, Ma.”

She patted his arm. “Better make it two, then.”

~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~

* (C) *

Light, crackling ice covered the two sections of canopy that were wedged under Clark’s arm. He had taken his ma’s advice—and couldn’t think of a better gift than the hatches he’d ripped off the mobile intimidation vehicle. To his relief, they hadn’t been recovered from the wreck site. The Bat was sure to miss them. The torn joints on the narrow edge of the canopies made them open like the ears of a bat: Clark would bet that parts like that had to be custom-fabricated on the sly from a manufacturer who wouldn’t ask too many questions about _motif_. From the Port, Clark had followed the trail of shed carbon fiber parts. The Bat tank’s path lead him through a snarl of decommissioned steel mills, sagging freeway underpasses, and a dense forest that rose out of the landscape like teeth.

And he now stood on the edge of a lake, along a dirt path that led through the twisting breaks in the trees—a path that led right into the edge of the water, with no detours. 

A lake entrance seemed the right amount of drama for the Bat, and a quick aerial scan proved the hunch: the end of the dirt path contained a series of interlocking pressure plates; several hundred meters into the lake, heavy-duty titanium airlock doors on massive hydraulic lifts loomed up from the shallow bed. When Clark had touched down on the pressure plates, an ultrasonic alarm had triggered and had been just as quickly silenced twenty minutes ago. 

Nothing had happened since then. The single house on the shore appeared empty, light from its austere interior blazing uselessly on the wine-dark lake; not even a perimeter alarm had stirred the Bat, or whoever wore its mask, from its underground nest. 

Clark blew out another frustrated breath, freezing the moisture out of the air. 

The Bat _had_ to know he was here. 

Clark dropped the peace offering on the ground and hovered off the plates, setting off another round of alarms. He picked out the nearest surveillance device, concealed underneath a nest of pine cones. He crossed his arms to make visible his annoyance. When the alarms went silent for a second time, Clark pointed at the doors to the Bat’s ultra-secret entrance and made the universal _open the hell up_ sign with his hands. 

With a heaving groan, the water parted as the airlock rose to the surface. The doors hissed as they slid open to admit him. Clark nodded at the security camera, thanking the Bat, maybe, or just acknowledging the fight that they were barreling towards at top speed. Clark arranged the canopies carefully so that they were stacked on top of each other underneath his right arm, smoothed down the anxious edges of his cape, and walked across the water to the airlock doors. 

As the doors slid shut behind him, he tried to suppress an instinctive shiver. He followed the access tunnel’s curving ramp in broken darkness (fluorescent safety lights were recessed into the rock at regular intervals) and collected pieces of armor as he went. By the time the tunnel threw him out into a wide cavern, his arms were full of the Bat vehicle’s aerodynamic addenda. 

The ramp dead-ended in a workshop that had been sunk into the cave’s bedrock with heavy pylons. This workshop housed a king’s ransom in hardware, framed by a wall of monitors that lit the space blood-red. Glass walls and gunmetal staircases rose up from the workshop to encase a complex of training rooms, laboratories, and a free-floating arsenal that covered every available shelf. The repair bay looked more like a supervillain’s nerve center than a workstation—but a supervillain’s monitors, Clark supposed, wouldn’t display a three-dimensional version of an Ikea manual: a vehicle exploded into its constituent parts, reassembling itself piece by piece with exclamation points and cheerful arrows. He wasn’t sure if he'd expected the Bat’s severe modernist aesthetic; but he was sure the same mind that had designed the cave was responsible for the glass misery-box above it. 

There were few shadows to be found in the harshly lit workshop, but the man in question had managed to find a patch shaded by a concrete lip and stood in it, cape drawn tightly around him as he watched a rotating set of video feeds on a smaller monitor on a fold-out arm. Each view displayed a different segment of the processional Clark had just completed, and in the last feed he saw himself as the Bat must see him: small and faintly ridiculous. 

The Bat didn’t turn around. 

That was more than fine. Clark didn’t need the Bat’s sneering attention to take a quick scan of his body to ensure that he wasn’t bleeding internally, and to retreat as gracefully as the circumstances would permit. 

On the monitor, Clark saw himself adopt a casual posture as he took in the cave; faster than the human eye could process, he was, in fact, scanning the Bat from head to foot, peeling back the layers of muscle deep enough to inspect his blood vessels, and then deeper past tendons and ligaments to trace his bones. Extensive bruising above the rib cage; busted tendon in the left knee. Both injuries appeared weeks-old. Everything else checked out—he was in no danger of sudden bleed-out. 

The Bat vehicle’s safety cell must have completely dispersed the energy of the crash. 

The Bat vehicle was parked on a rotating plinth. Mobile workbenches had been pulled up to it, whose drawers had seemingly been closed in great haste. The tools that were spilling out from the half-open drawers were familiar—wrenches, spanners, hex keys, sockets—but not in the standard sizes found at the Kent farmhouse. The vehicle was in rougher shape than Clark remembered: the side where it had drifted into Clark was crushed in; the aft where it had slammed into new construction at the Port was flattened; the driver’s cell gaped into the open air, missing the canopies that Clark had ripped off. But even all of that damage didn’t seem to account for the Bat vehicle’s missing front armor. It appeared to have sustained another hit after Clark had taken flight. 

As the silence between them lengthened into true awkwardness, Clark cleared his throat. 

“I brought the canopies that I, uh. I brought your canopies,” he said, as though it explained why Clark had ferreted out the Bat’s ultra-secret base.

He maneuvered them under his arm, shifting his shoulder, hands full of Bat tank cast-offs; there was no graceful way to return the canopies that didn’t look hopelessly unheroic—so he simply gave up on trying. With a sigh, he lifted his arm and let the canopies drop; and, quicker than the blink of an eye, Clark shifted his gravity. As he hovered off of the grate, the canopies caught on the edge of his gravity bubble and hovered with him, spinning lazily at thigh-height. Clark dumped an armful of armored parts into the closer of the two canopies, and shook out his cape, which had somehow caught a few floating washers. 

“And some extras,” he added. 

Something in the air shifted. The Bat’s heart rate spiked and then, as it had before, evened out into a languid crawl. They were twenty feet apart, much further than they had been at the Port, but Clark still felt the same heat lash across his senses. Hatred, anger, disgust: he could only guess which flavor of negative emotion it was. One thing was clear—with nothing else to split the Bat’s attention, the emotion was more potent now than it had been at the Port. 

“Don’t trust Kryptonians bearing gifts,” the Bat answered. He dropped his head from the monitor and squared his back, breathing deep and slow.

“Okay,” Clark said. 

(It wasn’t.)

He didn’t know what he’d done this time to earn such a chilly reception, but he suspected that the Bat didn’t take kindly to being reined in like an unruly horse. Or Clark was, somehow, continuing to make the same mistake that he had at the Port. 

Clark allowed his gravity bubble to subside. The canopies floated down to the grate with a quiet clank. He cleared his throat. “I’m done here. Sorry for the intrusion. I’ll go.”

He expected no answer—had already stepped away from his cargo, floated halfway up to the ceiling and pivoted towards the access tunnel—when a scraped-out rasp echoed through the cave: “What the hell are you doing here, Kal?” 

Hostile as ever, radiating the same blisteringly hot energy. And yet—

If the Bat wanted him gone, he only had to wait for him to fly through the access tunnel and to activate the airlock doors. This wasn’t a challenge so much as it was an overture. His feet whispered against the grates as he touched down a scant ten feet from the immobile form of the Bat. 

“You remembered my name,” and Clark couldn’t help the warmth that curled in his chest—or the grimace that flashed across his face when he realized just how much of that warmth had curled into his voice.

The Bat’s heart rate spiked again as his shoulders hitched backwards. That same hot energy poured through the air, rolling as thick as honey across Clark’s tongue, redolent with the taste of him. The thought cracked across his brain, blazing faster than good sense: Clark wanted the Bat. Hard. Up against one of his modernist pillars. Or over the crushed chassis of his car. He took one faltering step back, as the Bat turned to him and threw open the cape. Against the carbon fiber material that fell in bunching waves around his crotch, Clark could tell something was missing from the Batsuit and something else had very much been added.

His own uniform provided terrible cover; the material stretched and bunched and outlined—Clark saw the exact moment when the Bat discovered what Clark already knew, eyes widening underneath the cowl—the look one part terror, one part awe, and one part frustration. Clark swallowed. One thing was certain: his chances of escaping the cave with his dignity intact had flatlined.

The Bat’s question hung between them, unanswered: _what was Clark doing here?_ Nothing could make the situation more awkward than a little poorly-timed blood flow had already done, so he thought he might try the truth. 

Stony silence radiated from the Bat as Clark explained how he had recovered the Bat tank parts ( _Batmobile_ , came the correction) as a plausible excuse for checking the Bat for signs of internal hemorrhaging—that he had wanted to confirm that the Bat wouldn’t die for Clark’s display of power at the Port. 

“You’re in no danger of bleeding out,” Clark assured, but the Bat jerked away from him as though he’d handed him a death sentence.

“Unbelievable.” The Bat turned and stalked back towards the diagnostic monitors, cape flaring out in an improbable cascade of fabric. “Incredible. So you violate my base to compromise my—”

“No.” Clark’s jaw clicked audibly as it swung closed, biting back the anger. When he began again, it was as Superman, not Clark Kent; voice measured, even, and soft: a voice that commanded attention from the most powerful men and women in the world. “My only goal was to confirm that you were unharmed. Your identity is safe.”

The Bat seemed immune to the Superman voice and its demand for patience. Hunched over a counter, he picked up a combo socket wrench, knuckles whitening around its haft. Clark wondered if it would become a weapon in the Bat’s hands, when, all at once, the Bat ripped off his cowl and flung it down at his feet. From the back, Clark couldn’t tell much about the man under the mask: sweat plastered his hair against his skull; his hand wielded a wrench like he might be foolish enough to try hand-to-hand combat; his temples were, surprisingly, graying. 

“If I asked you to leave, would you?” 

Without the voice-changer, the voice tickled the edge of Clark’s memory. It was rough and flat and—familiar to him. He found that he’d taken steps to close the distance between them. 

“If that’s what you want,” he said neutrally. 

Clark stopped himself at the edge of grate ramp where the cement foundations plunged into the bedrock—where the cave became the Bat’s proper lair—and sprung lightly into the air. He was as outwardly unconcerned by the desire to fuck the vigilante on the hood of the Batmobile as he could manage despite the evidence that a simple glance back at him would provide. But the Bat wasn’t facing him; and Clark was ready to depart at his command. 

The Bat set the wrench down and rested his fists against the console’s controls. “You recognize it, don’t you. My voice.” His laugh was bitter. “It’s plastered across enough celebrity endorsement deals. Even Superman must know it. Gotham’s very own freak dressed like a clown.”

The grate bent underneath his feet as Clark landed heavily. He did know that voice. The disdain of it had curdled small talk into something vaguely lewd; the tone of it had dressed him down for his paper’s (and unknowingly, his own) hypocrisy for covering Superman while condemning the Bat. A vigilante above the law, just like—

“Bruce Wayne?” 

The Bat turned his head enough to frame his profile in the red glow of the monitors, mouth pulled into that same flat line that it had had at Lex’s library benefit. 

All the pieces had been there for him to assemble: Bruce’s disappearing act into the server room; the mission-assist from his hidden comm; the temple of metal and glass in the same spare aesthetic as the new Wayne Tower. The Bat and his trappings were a utilitarian exercise in control—only affordable to someone for whom money, or material, or manpower would never be in short supply. 

Despite his intention to leave Bruce this last veil of privacy, he started forward again. As he broke the plane of the Workshop, Bruce’s eyelids fluttered as though Clark had kissed the base of his throat. 

“If I asked you to leave—would you, now that you know?” Bruce asked, drawing out his words with the same studied indifference that had been just as much a screen at Lex’s manor as it was here; because Bruce’s heart, as sluggishly uninterested as it sounded, was a ruse. Clark remembered what he had read about biofeedback; that it could be used to control autonomic function in a human body much the way that he had control over (almost) all of his body’s functions—whether his muscles would repel a speeding vehicle, or whether they would give under someone’s touch, and, yes—his skin prickled in anticipation. 

He wanted to touch and to be touched. 

Bruce couldn’t call back what Clark already knew about him: how Bruce’s cock strained free of the groin protector that had been removed from his skintight suit; how terror and admiration had mixed hopelessly with lust when Clark had caught him out. 

As softly as he dared, but still in Superman’s voice, he said: “I have a counter-proposal.” 

Bruce’s eyebrow arched lazily; but the rest of his body stilled, face half-turned as he gazed at Clark over his shoulder.

“I kiss you, and you tell me something that you want.”

Clark saw the moment when Bruce’s pupils dilated and his back straightened; in the time that it had taken for Clark to catalogue all of markers of Bruce’s arousal (and discard the changes as delayed-reaction trauma), he closed the distance between them. Bathed in the same red glow of the workshop’s monitors, they were close enough to touch; one only had to reach out to the other. 

That thought must have crossed Bruce’s mind, too, because Bruce’s gauntleted hand shot out and closed around Clark’s windpipe. The motion wasn’t wholly unkind; as Bruce squeezed, his thumb caressed the side of Clark’s neck—and Clark turned his cheek toward that point of warmth, chasing after it as he might the sun breaking through the clouds on a rain-soaked Kansas day.

He desperately wanted to feel Bruce’s fingers sink into his skin, so he relaxed into the pressure of Bruce’s grip. Clark’s throat compressed and he experienced the sensation of choking—or the nearest facsimile to it. Kryptonian metabolism meant that he didn’t need to take another breath for at least an hour; and if he flexed his muscles, Bruce’s chokehold would slide off his neck like hooves on thick ice. If he could bring himself to reject the slow circle of Bruce’s thumb over his pulse point, the soaring sense of possibility opening up under Bruce’s hand. 

Clark let his head fall back in a voiceless moan. 

Bruce swallowed back whatever sound he was going to make, but his voice still hitched. “Get out.”

Clark obliged him by tracing the path of a zipper down the arm that was choking him. “Then let go of me,” he said gently. 

“ _Leave,_ ” Bruce hissed, as he turned and pulled Clark flush against him. 

Clark felt the heat rush downward into his groin as Bruce’s erection jutted against his hipbone. “You’ll have to release me.” 

Bruce gave him the same cutting glance that he had at the library benefit; from the distance of inches, it didn’t quite have the desired effect. 

“If you’re going to be difficult, Kal—” Bruce’s voice broke on a groan, as his hand released Clark at last, only to alight on his hip. Bruce slotted Clark’s erection next to his own and rolled his hips. The feeling of it overwhelmed Clark—the silky Kryptonian cloth and the muted grooves of the Batsuit’s carbon fiber weave dragging across his cock. “The least you could do is help with the zippers.” 

A prescient understanding of the Bat vigilante’s mindset ( _it’s easier to ask forgiveness because it’s actually impossible to obtain permission_ ) encouraged Clark to apply a little super-strength and a burst of speed to have Bruce seated on the crumpled hood of the car before he could object to the plan. Bruce pursed his lips as his eyes traced the distance from the diagnostic monitors to the hood, perhaps calculating the speed across the workshop floor, as though that might reveal critical information about his powers. 

Mercifully, Bruce refrained from comment. 

The moment of scrutiny passed and Bruce hooked his legs around Clark’s knees to draw him into fuller contact with his body; Clark allowed himself to wobble, as though he might tumble into Bruce’s arms. The surprise (and momentary terror) on Bruce’s face were more than repayment, so when Clark allowed himself to be moved at last it was to step forward into the V of Bruce’s legs, Clark’s interest pressing against Bruce’s leg, hot and hard and aching. 

And Clark was hot to the touch. Thermoregulation was always a dicey proposition when he was this aroused—but as long as he remained in his suit, in cloth engineered to withstand the heat of atmospheric reentry, he didn’t need to keep himself on such a tight leash. 

Clark blew out a breath and reveled in the warmth that shuddered through him—reveled in the frisson that shot through Bruce—as he rolled his hips experimentally against Bruce’s inner thigh. Bruce didn’t bother muffling his noises this time: a staccato series of gasps that were probably more about _who was doing this to him_ than the physical sensation of Clark’s erection grinding against him through the layers of carbon fiber and Nomex plating. 

Clark’s cock strained against slick Kryptonian fabric; he felt everything as well as he would if he were naked—but it was undeniable: the bright points of contact between their bodies would be so much better if he could peel Bruce out of his shell. 

Clark traced the branching seams of the carbon fiber suit with his eyes. “I don’t actually know how your...any of this works. Where do I start?”

Bruce grabbed one of his hands, and then rotated them both, to present Clark with the catches of the gauntlet underneath his wrist; they were flush with the material, and designed to be activated like switches for quick disengagement. 

“Got it.” Clark grinned at Bruce as his fingers slotted into the catch releases. The gauntlet came off with a sharp tug. “Keep pulling until something tears.” 

*

Mercy, like silence, didn’t last. 

Clark had barely unzipped the front of the Batsuit from the forearms to their connecting point on Bruce’s chest, and was tugging the armored plates off of Bruce’s shoulders—the body armor on the suit was interposed between the outer suit and a black undersuit, and was thinner and more aerodynamically flexible than Clark had ever seen when he was covering the tech beat at STAR Labs—when Bruce nuzzled the shell of Clark’s ear. 

The gesture was more intimate than Clark was prepared for; he nearly fumbled the last plate onto the hood of the Batmobile. Catching it on the tips of his fingers, Clark reflexively hugged it tight against his chest. 

Bruce dropped his gaze to the armor cradled in Clark’s arms, then flicked it lazily back up to his face in an uncanny mirror of that first moment at Lex’s benefit; except it wasn’t genially bewildered Bruce Wayne perusing his person, it was the calculated gesture of a vigilante who had waged a private war on Gotham’s entrenched corruption for twenty years. That alone should have been Clark’s first intimation of danger, but his heart surged traitorously as Bruce leaned in again. Slow and deliberate, he brushed the side of Clark’s face with his cheek, breath cool against Clark’s flushed skin, and whispered, “Why did you wreck my Batmobile, boyscout?” 

Clark reared back, incredulous. The same half-lidded gaze met him, except Bruce’s hand was gripping the edge of the front grill; the riot-ready fender had crumpled inward in a circular-shaped dent, and scraps of foliage had caught along its sheared-off edges. The Batmobile’s side had struck Clark as it had drifted around a corner; this damage had been sustained after its encounter with Kryptonian compressive strength. He stopped short of asking Bruce for clarification about a second accident—or Bruce’s question—and opted to take him at face value.

“The Bat was out of control,” Clark started. He paused and shook his head to dismiss the mental maneuvering. It was unworthy of them both. “Nothing was going to stop you, so I had to.” 

The armored plates clattered to the ground, punctuating his sentence with more force than he was feeling. 

One of the corners of Bruce’s mouth curled up; whatever expression it was meant to be, it wasn’t friendly. “That’s rich, coming from you.” 

Clark stilled. His hands were inches away from pushing Bruce’s legs off the backs of his knees, or reeling him in closer so Clark could grind his answer against Bruce in defiance; had maybe wanted to do the same when those words had tumbled out of Bruce Wayne’s mouth at Lex’s benefit. 

He clenched his jaw. “I didn’t come to apologize.” 

“If you’re anything like a human, you haven’t come at all.” 

Clark untangled the joke from the barb about his Kryptonian heritage. It was as unimpressive as the Bat’s do you bleed? had been when he had stood before Clark, head bowed by the weight of—what might not have been anger, after all. Oh, god. _Even then?_ Had Bruce, standing in the broken Batmobile cockpit, been as aroused as he was now? Clark’s gaze whipped back up to Bruce's face. His mouth was still twisted up in the same unfriendly smirk, but his eyes softened, crinkling at the corners. He looked fond.

Leaving was still on the table. Clark could manage this punch-drunk desire with his own hand (an arm curled around his pillow and the afghan tangled around his feet) and without further implicating himself to a dangerous vigilante. It was the least risky option. He didn't have to draw in closer to Bruce; or brush a hand against Bruce's chin; or pull Bruce’s mouth to his own in a feverish kiss. But he did, and he couldn’t bring himself to regret it.

~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~

* (C) *

Loose-limbed and half-naked, Bruce sprawled on the Batmobile. His knees were hitched up on the flat hood of his vehicle as though he were settling in for a night of stargazing (and hypothermia). The chestpiece of the outer suit, lining armor plates, and black undersuit had been discarded next to the Batmobile's front tires; in the soft glow of the monitors, now blue, the stacked plates shone like iridescent scales, throwing and catching the reflection of Gotham’s Bat vigilante laid out across his Batmobile in a riot of color. 

As Clark returned to normal speed at the edge of the workshop, Bruce’s gaze locked onto him. The human-shaped motion detector didn’t even seem to mind that the sudden deceleration had scattered loose schematics across the floor; Clark, however, forced himself to walk across the rest of the grating without stopping to fish them up. Bruce’s heartbeat crawled at a sedate pace as he approached, but Clark could feel the reckless mood sharpening in the chilly cave air. 

“Got it,” Clark said. The packet of medical-grade lube dangled from his fingers. Bruce grunted in the affirmative, as if he was in no great hurry for anything in particular. A front. Bruce seemed nervous, if that was the right word for it. 

Clark approached the Batmobile cautiously. 

It had been a long night. The exhilaration of being wanted had gone to Clark’s head, but his own desire churned unsteadily in his gut, flaking and cracking if he put too much pressure on it. 

At least Bruce didn't appear to be reckoning up the seconds it had taken for Clark to cross two levels of stairs, open a medical kit, retrieve the item in question, detour through the gym and the upper-level workshops, and return. Curiosity about Bruce was only natural—but the detour hadn’t been as enlightening as he'd hoped. Aside from learning that Bruce owned a unique combination of workout props and an all-situations armory, the Bat remained opaque. Bruce’s chemical reactions might be an open book to Clark, but there was no thread that he could pull to explain how a billionaire's heir transformed into this particular combination of willpower and obsession. 

Clark leaned against the smashed-in semi-circle of the Batmobile’s fender, until he was close enough to run his hand down the backs of Bruce’s thighs. The pits and grooves of the carbon-fiber weave were coarse against his skin but he felt no tell-tale ridges of metal teeth. 

No zippers on the pants.

Bruce’s breath didn’t catch as Clark’s hand reached his ass. He was equally silent when Clark pulled it away. 

"I could just—" Clark ripped open the small packet to mime ripping open the suit. "I don't think you'd want me to."

"That would be fine." Bruce shrugged. It was an almost convincing boredom—or would have been, if his hand hadn't trembled as he grabbed the waistband of the outer suit. 

Overwhelmed, Clark glanced down at the lube packet in his hand and worked on coating his fingers with its gel. Giving Bruce a measure of privacy as he undressed seemed the right thing to do; it was a far less intimate thing he was proposing to do, than to watch the Bat struggle against the force of his own desire. 

When Clark looked back up, Bruce had yanked his pants down to his knees. Clark didn't drop the packet, but it was a near miss. Underneath the gray carbon fiber suit, Bruce was wearing another black undersuit layer; unlike the top, the bottom was missing a rectangular patch over the pelvis, with small grommets in the fabric that attached to a missing piece of Bruce’s kit. 

Before Clark could ask why the Bat’s undersuit was crotchless, Bruce warned: "Don’t. Just _don’t_.” 

Clark floated himself forward and dropped his hand down to stroke Bruce’s cock. Bruce’s eyelids fluttered. A muscle jumped in his jaw in time to Clark’s motion. “It’s okay, Bruce. Only what you’re comfortable with.” 

As he pulled his hand up and down Bruce’s shaft, over the soft crown of the glans, down along the dark line that trailed down his cock, Clark bit down on the noise he wanted to make. God. Just touching him felt reverent, as Clark’s free hand settled underneath Bruce’s thigh, squeezing the muscle lightly, then stroking, then petting—painfully aware that desiring Bruce implicated him to the Bat vigilante in ways that he probably wouldn’t fully regret until daylight sowed its discontent. 

“You think I’m comfortable with this?” Bruce said softly. Clark froze; before Clark could pull back, Bruce seized Clark’s hand. “I didn’t say stop.” 

A breathless silence stretched between them. Bruce’s grip relaxed by degrees, until the pads of Bruce’s fingers just barely grazed the tips of Clark’s—a tenuous point of connection between them. 

Incomprehensible. They weren’t holding hands. 

Clark stared at their hands like they were superpowered hostiles about to hurl a bus full of school children off of the Metropolis Civic Bridge. Bruce glanced down, and then frowned. He slid his palm—dry, callused in a way that suggested a routine of heavy, gloveless lifting (probably that anchor-grade chain Clark had spotted in the gym)—against Clark’s and clasped the outside of his hand. When he looked back up, there was an open, quizzical tilt to his head. 

They were _definitely_ holding hands. 

“Let me be clear, I want whatever this is, but, jesus, Kal—” 

Clark waited for Bruce’s sentence to resolve itself into a counterpoint, but Bruce trailed off as his eyes slid over to the side of the workshop. As his body language closed off, Bruce pulled himself up into a crossed-legged position—but he didn’t let go of Clark's hand. Instead, he tugged it sharply, encouraging Clark forward. Clark obliged him as gracefully as he could in that slick material of Kryptonian suits, which seemed to reject all friction and adhesion; he climbed the front grill of the Batmobile, crawled up the hood, and knelt next to Bruce. 

It wasn’t close enough. 

Bruce tugged Clark’s hand across his body until Clark got the picture and cautiously straddled Bruce’s lap. Bruce finally released him, only to grapple onto the sides of Clark’s hips as though to hold him steady—but like so many other things, Bruce’s hands skated over the cloth. He pressed his cock against the ridge of Clark’s erection, smearing lube and sweat against the suit. Surprisingly, the Kryptonian tech seemed content to let _that_ remain. 

Clark smothered a look of comical disbelief by wetting his lips, but Bruce was already pulling handfuls of the material away from Clark’s skin, attention firmly back on the logistics of the sex they seemed to be teetering on the edge of not having. The sharp, reckless heat of Bruce’s emotions had dulled; his heartbeat was as even as if he were browsing his corporate shareholder portfolio.

What was Bruce even getting out of this? 

“How do you take it off?” The cloth slid out of Bruce’s fingers with a throaty _twang_. 

“Finish what you were going to say,” Clark said. “And I’ll consider it.” 

Bruce snorted. “You have me mostly naked on the hood of my own car. I expect the bottom off, at least.”

“Bargaining, Bruce?” Clark teased. “Tell me what you want, and you can have it. You know the price.” 

“Do you know why the Bat trashed the Gotham Port tonight, Kal?”

“No,” Clark admitted after a long pause. 

He hadn’t bothered to run down any of the names whispered amongst the mercenaries tonight; it hadn’t even crossed his mind that he would need to. 

Bruce glanced at him sidelong and then slid his eyes over to the security monitor. “Do you care why?” he asked, voice low and dangerous. 

“ _Of course_ I care.” 

The corner of Bruce’s mouth twitched, and he bowed his head.

The reprise of Bruce’s performance on the Batmobile—the strange unasked-for submission mixed with a healthy dose of disrespect—while Clark was sitting on Bruce’s _lap_... The time for playing fair had passed. Clark pressed his ass down on Bruce’s cock. 

Bruce’s head shot up. Whatever he saw made him suck in a startled breath; one of his hands came up, half open, placating, but Clark dove down and kissed Bruce and as he kissed him, he rolled his hips downward slowly, sharply. Clark didn’t bother to restrain himself this time—let the Bat know just how much Clark wanted to feel Bruce against him—and as his moan broke against wind-chapped lips, Bruce finally sparked to life. 

Pulse thrumming under his skin, Bruce cupped Clark’s chin, anchoring him, as Bruce kissed him back. 

It was Bruce that broke the kiss but it was Clark who pulled in a ragged breath. 

“I couldn’t be sure—” Bruce said on his own gasp, grabbing a handful of the suit, and tugged Clark down with him. They toppled onto the Batmobile, tussling like they were testing each other’s defenses, until Clark rolled himself underneath and held Bruce in place above him—not as a show of force, but to hold him still while Clark bucked up against him in one long, dirty drag. But he allowed Bruce to shrug off the touch; he even managed not to grind against him again as Bruce planted a closed fist next to his ear. 

Outside the cave a Gotham city police siren sang out into the night as it responded to a call that wouldn’t benefit from Superman’s presence. The siren subsided into the quiet chittering of bats in the branching caves beyond Bruce’s workshop, the hum of his supercooled computers, the hiss of the cave’s labyrinthine HVAC system, Bruce’s beating heart. Bruce stared down at Clark as though through a cloud of probability, each successive outcome slightly more impossible, until all of their actions tonight had narrowed to this tableau—Clark stretched out across the hood of an over-engineered urban tank in his family’s legacy, Bruce committing the sight of his red cape draping over the black carbon armor to memory.

Or maybe he was deciding whether or not it was acceptable to kiss Clark again. Clark closed the distance to show Bruce how acceptable it was. 

And that would have been enough for him—kissing Bruce, pressing against him, opening to him, teasing at the tip of his tongue, or taking him deeper; simply reveling in the pleasure of connecting to him—but nothing could delay the night from turning from curious to disastrous. 

Clark slid against Bruce’s cock in a slow rhythm. To his consternation, the normally frictionless material bunched and rode up uncomfortably around his pelvis, as the inside of the suit burned feverishly against his skin. Clark surreptitiously ran a hand down the suit’s exterior (it was within the range of human-acceptable temperatures), when Bruce caught his hand and interlaced their fingers. 

This first intimation of danger slipped through Clark’s notice. Instead, he curled his fingers around Bruce’s in undisguised pleasure.

Bruce’s head dipped again. He couldn’t look Clark in the eyes. This second intimation of danger, Clark almost let go; he knew Bruce wanted him, and he knew Bruce wanted this, and he was beginning to armor himself against Bruce Wayne’s idea of humor. But he stopped moving when Bruce dropped the other hand to his chest.

“You save them now, Kal, but you don’t stick around.” 

The flat statement of fact needled Clark. The arguments to contradict Bruce leapt into his mind. Except none of his _truth, justice and the American way_ could muster a cogent defense. Because the truth was, in the past eighteen months, Clark _hadn’t_ stuck around. Even on his whirlwind world tour, spurred on by the seed of doubt that Bruce Wayne had planted at the Library benefit, Clark had flown from city to city, call to call, rescuing, helping, saving—but the aftermath always unfolded when he was already half a world away, hefting boulders, rescuing exploding capsules, hip-deep in flood waters as he pulled the next family to safety. 

Clark squeezed Bruce’s hand and let it go. As much as he wanted to grind up against Bruce, he stilled and visibly relaxed: a conscious choice to disarm himself in front of Bruce. “You’re not exactly out giving interviews from your tank,” Clark started.

Though Clark saw Bruce pull his arm back, saw the fist ball, knew what was coming next—he held still. At the last second, Bruce’s fist veered off and connected with the hood of the car instead. The chassis dented underneath the force of the blow. “Bat _mobile_.” 

Clark ignored the correction. “You know why I can’t stay. Superman helps—that’s all. His actions should be enough.”

Bruce leaned hard enough against his knuckles to whiten them against the dark metal of the Batmobile. He loomed over Clark, and Clark pinged _danger, aggressive, violence_ but underneath it he felt the currents of _arousal, desire, excitement._ “I don’t know why you do it.” 

“If it’s in my power, I will always save them, Bruce.” 

A hand brushed under Clark’s chin, pulling his gaze up to meet Bruce’s—a strange tightness around Bruce’s eyes. When he smiled, it wasn’t friendly. 

“I’ve heard that talk before from people who had more to lose than you’ll ever understand. How many of them do you think are still standing on the side of good? I’ve been in this fight for twenty years, son. What are your promises worth against that?”

As slowly (and clumsily) as he could, Clark rolled Bruce off of him and pushed himself up on his elbows. He bumped a shoulder into Bruce to keep it light, playful, but Bruce shrugged off the touch as he stared into the Batmobile’s driver cage, the metal jagged behind the seat where Clark had torn out the canopies as easily as pages of a book. 

It was as warm and dry in the cave as it would feel in his apartment and his body was all but immune to microclimate fluctuations. Clark shivered anyway. 

“I’m not sure what you want from me, here.”

“What happens when an entire goddamn city cries out for help, but saving human lives isn’t on your _priority list_?” 

If Clark had thought to put the pieces together when Bruce unmasked, he might have made the connection before the situation had spun this far out of control. But as it was, he caught up with Bruce’s seething anger when it was already too late.

“Wayne Financial?” Clark said—

(Zod had cut it down in his first spasm of power, heat vision bisecting the skyscraper before Clark could throw him out of the city; he had tried to keep their fight outside the downtown corridor, but like a broken record, their fight had kept skipping and scratching deeper into the grooves of the city.)

—and mentally kicked himself for the reporters’ junket question. 

“ _All_ of them, Kal. Some new alien shows up with a grudge—what kind of damage should I expect the next time you decide to throw your problem through a skyscraper? What’s a few lives weighed against the defense of the planet? So a few people die; so a building falls; so some kids are loaded into a system that only gives a shit about them generating another paycheck. The military calls it ‘collateral damage’. I bet you have a fancy term for it too, to justify the wreckage that accumulates in your wake.”

Bruce was standing by the end of the tirade, blue shadows slashing violent chevrons across his body. 

“Hey,” Clark said softly, in counterpoint to his thundering pulse, as he climbed off the hood of the Batmobile and stood in Bruce’s space. “Do you want an ethics lesson, or do you want to get off?” 

“The deal was I get to tell you something that I want for a kiss.” Bruce balled his fist into the cape, and hauled Clark forward into a hard kiss. Clark fought down the instinctive tensing of his muscles, let the violence of it abate before he pulled back from Bruce. 

“The Port of Gotham, tonight. Lex Luthor imported a mineral that could kill you. I wanted it out of Lex’s hands and into mine. I’d wrestled with my decision. Hesitated to pursue this lead.” Bruce clenched his jaw. “You brought the war to us two years ago. I wanted to _kill_ you, Kal.” 

Bruce turned towards the monitors. The glow of the exploded-view schematics blocked his last expression. “I think we’re done here.” 

Clark didn’t breathe. 

“Yeah,” he agreed, at last. “I think we are.”

Clark crossed the threshold of the access tunnel much more quickly than he had entered it. As the lake drained back into the maw of the cave, he heard everything: the HVAC system kicking over into its warming cycle; water dripping against rock, steel, and glass; the murmuring of bats echoing through the caverns that honeycombed the lake basin. Still—Clark couldn’t miss the final warning Bruce delivered, barely more than a whisper.

“Don’t come back. I won’t hesitate next time.” 

~ ~ ~ * * * ~ ~ ~

* (C) *

Clark’s life had been full of warnings. Most had been from his father, indelibly tied to the scenes of his childhood: driving stakes into the pasture fences that had been knocked down by curious heifers; standing shoulder-to-shoulder pushing the tractor into the field under a hazy morning sky; feeding lumps of sugar to the stable horses on their long days between ploughs. Some had come later from his mother, from Lois, from Perry, from Zod himself. None weighed so heavily on him as a particular freeway underpass on a day that (given the power to do so) he would unwrite in a heartbeat. 

But the power of words hadn't escaped him. When he grabbed the messenger bag from the gargoyle where he had forgotten it earlier that night, he hovered next to the stylized eagle and looked out across the city. The gargoyle held court with the low-rises that he had visited earlier that day. From this vantage point, he could see the low-rises pressed up against a line of glass-and-girder commercial developments that advertised vacant office space, new opportunities. 

The towers were empty. 

Despite the candy-colored promises of Wayne Construction, revitalization seemed to always be out of reach of Gotham. Now that he had met the man, Clark could survey the motivations for it with some insight into how bloodyminded a person would have to be to single-handedly drag his city across the rocks of post-industrial insecurity into the future; how the Bat, and Bruce Wayne, were both destined to fail, swimming alone against that tide. How even his warning to Clark had constituted a promise of future actions that maybe couldn’t live up to the reality of the situation: so far, nothing aside from another Kryptonian could injure Clark. 

(Probably no one had warned a young Bruce that money and willpower wasn’t always enough to change the world.)

—It wasn’t his problem tonight. Whatever Bruce was prepared to do, Clark had time to respond.

Clark slung the bag across his torso, settling it over the cape. 

He shot up past the clouds and, a minute later, touched down on the roof of his apartment. He unhooked the cape and slipped a shirt and slacks over the suit before he descended into the building. The roof access door banged on its hinges as a group of teens swarmed around him, shoving each other eagerly. There were several coolers and binoculars between them. A girl straggled up the stairs, maneuvering a high-powered telescope around the stair railings. Hugging the messenger bag to his chest, Clark made himself unobtrusive at the landing to his floor as she hustled past, and called up after her to ask if they were out to watch the Taurids. She nodded absently as she continued her climb, and that almost tugged a smile out of Clark, until he heard— _night vigilante_ — _he’s in Gotham, but there could be one here too!_ —from the roof crew. 

In his apartment, it wasn’t much better. Furtive whispers from the vigilante-spotters blended into the hum of traffic through Metropolis’ arteries. Her late-night galas let out, midnight showings disgorged their excited patrons onto the streets, and—for those awake and at home in the world—their laughter rose like incense curling around the secret places where people who could connect to each other, fit together. 

Clark undressed, first pulling off the shirt and slacks, but even that wasn’t enough. He sloughed off his family’s crest and let it lay where it fell from his hands. 

As he pulled the covers over him in bed, he listened closely for where he might fit. The cries for help. The smaller sounds of distress. A person’s labored breath.

—Not for the sound of a particular person breathing. 

(Bruce had warned him. He wouldn’t hesitate next time.

The threat—to kill you—was the clear punctuation to Bruce’s promise. But now, Clark remembered. 

Bruce had hesitated about more than one thing.)

And the sound of Bruce’s breathing—even, calm, still, but catching, accelerating, then calming—the night flooded back into Clark’s mind and he hardened under the covers in a full-body convulsion. God, but he still wanted Bruce. To pull him flush against his body with a heel hooked around his calf, to slip a finger into his mouth, to press inside of Bruce with his fingers, his fist, his cock. 

The next shudder knocked the afghan off of the bed. And the cresting wave when he took himself in hand, muffling his cries in the crook of his own elbow, shifted his gravity. The thought of Bruce lying on the Batmobile, affecting boredom as his body thrummed with the same anticipation that Clark felt. He—god—he didn’t care what Bruce wouldn’t hesitate to do to him the next time they met. When he came, he crashed through the bed frame and cratered the concrete floor. 

He felt the flutter of his pulse in the base of his cock as he rode out his aftershocks, staring blankly through the roof to the clouds massing in a dome over Gotham and Metropolis. 

Contacting Bruce again would be foolish. 

It would be a risk, but he’d make the exception for Gotham.

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't already, check out the [art](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11264247) that [steals_thyme](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain/pseuds/Steals_Thyme) made for this fic. It's crazy good.
> 
> Depending on who you ask, this fic is the result of a dare, a challenge, or a joke; but whatever the case, this fic owes its existence to the Superbat Big Bang--the sprints that were run, and the community that was formed as we all shuffled our way towards posting week. And I'm especially indebted to architeuthis and steals_thyme, who listened to every inch of the whining I did about this fic, and made me keep writing towards that Batmobile porn anyways. Thank you to everyone who has participated in the SBB community. My love goes out to you all.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[ART] The Crush Zone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11264247) by [Liodain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain/pseuds/Liodain)




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